On October fourteenth, Ukrainian attack drones started dropping out of the sky. One unit lost dozens of them in a single stretch, more than a million dollars' worth, and stopped flying for three days. Nobody shot them down. Their satellite connection was cut, and the satellites belong to Elon Musk.
Today we cover three things. What happened to Ukraine's Starlink service in October and who gave the order. Four years of one man deciding where his satellites work during a war. And how big Starlink has become, who depends on it, and who is racing to build around it.
Ukraine's army runs on two versions of the same system. Starlink is the commercial service anybody can buy for a farmhouse or a camper. Starshield is the military version, sold to governments. In August twenty twenty four, the Pentagon paid SpaceX to connect about two thousand five hundred more Ukrainian terminals to Starshield, on top of five hundred already on it. Ukraine uses both to fly drones, guide strikes, and keep units talking to each other along a front that runs hundreds of miles.
Overnight on October thirteenth, something changed. Terminals on anything moving faster than about a hundred miles an hour lost their signal. Ukrainian officials told the New York Times the first cutoff was even lower, closer to forty miles an hour. That covers drones, and it covers the fast interceptors Ukraine uses to knock down Iranian made Shahed drones before they hit cities.
Serhiy Beskrestnov, a technology adviser to President Zelensky, put it out the next morning. SpaceX had added a speed limit to terminals in motion. Ukraine's forces got no warning. Missions were disrupted. He said the timing could not be a coincidence and had to be tied to the political situation.
The damage showed up fast. The Institute for the Study of War tracks Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian vehicles. Before the cutoff, Ukraine was hitting one hundred to two hundred vehicles a day. On October fourteenth, it fell under fifty. Units of the Seventh Air Assault Corps near Huliaipole reported their links going dead.
The same week, Russia hit Ukraine with more than one hundred drones and five ballistic missiles in one night. About six hundred thousand people lost power. Zelensky said Ukraine got no early warning from its partners before those missiles came in.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's former defense minister, posted that evening that service was coming back for anything moving up to about a hundred miles an hour, and attack drones and interceptors could fly again. Anything faster stayed blocked.
On October sixteenth, Zelensky posted his own description. Starlink was not turned off, he wrote, its speed was reduced. He said Ukraine uses it for mid range strikes on Russian military targets inside occupied Ukraine, and to chase down the jet powered versions of the Shahed.
Then came the question everybody wanted answered. Who ordered it?
Musk answered first. On October fourteenth and fifteenth he posted that Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the United States government. He wrote that any limits on speed or use are decided by the American military, and ultimately by the President. In the same run of posts he wrote, and so the slaughter continues, and then, time for Zelensky to go.
Reuters went to its own sources. Two American officials and one Western official said the order came from inside the White House, and that Pentagon leaders were told to slow Starshield for Ukraine. A senior American official denied it and said no such request was ever made by the President.
Four days later, the Wall Street Journal reported something different. According to the Journal, Musk ordered the slowdown himself.
The administration did not speak with one voice either. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Starlink is a private company, and the President does not run it and cannot direct it to do anything. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, we haven't pulled anything back, and added that there are terms of service that have to be followed. Vice President Vance said Musk runs a private corporation.
The President's own answer was it wasn't me, and I don't think it was Elon. A day later he said it made no difference whether he called or somebody else called. Then the Wall Street Journal reported the President phoned Musk himself to say he was frustrated the speed cap was still on. On October twenty third, Reuters reported nothing had changed. Beskrestnov said Ukraine was not seeing any lifting of the limits.
Meanwhile Zelensky gave an interview to the Financial Times. He said the outage was not a technical problem. In his words, it was the will. He said American military contacts had warned Ukrainian officers that if Ukraine kept hitting Russian oil refineries, America would block intelligence. Later, Kyiv was told the whole thing was a technical glitch.
Ukraine had stopped hitting Russian refineries for a few days. Accounts differ on the length. Reuters said two days. The Associated Press said three. Zelensky then told the Financial Times the block on refinery strikes was out, and Ukraine was done waiting. He said Ukraine would only hold off again if it got more Patriot interceptors.
The refinery story did not end there. On October twenty ninth, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ukraine's long range drone units had been told in mid October that the refinery campaign was effectively on hold, possibly until after the American midterms. Reuters could not confirm it. The next night, drones set fire to the Rosneft refinery at Novokuybyshevsk, in Russia's Samara region. It was the first refinery hit in about two weeks.
On October twenty fourth, Zelensky announced Starlink and Starshield were back to the speeds Ukraine had before the cutoff. Ukraine's defense ministry reported stable connections above two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Zelensky also pointed out that the same terminals had worked faster inside the European Union than inside Ukraine during the slowdown.
That same day, Musk gave a different explanation from the one he gave ten days earlier. He wrote that using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed. He wrote that a loophole had been closed the week before, and that SpaceX simply enforced its terms of service. He called his critics bloodthirsty warmongers. And he wrote that if Starlink were turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately.
Ukraine pushed back on the facts. Beskrestnov said commercial Starlink does not even work over Russian territory, so Ukraine physically cannot use it for deep strikes into Russia. Zelensky said the drone use is defensive, and he said civilians died while the service was cut.
The pushback came from Republicans too. Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy SEAL, answered Musk directly. He asked what Musk thinks defending your country is, and said of course those drones have been used to kill people. Democrat Eugene Vindman said the denials were causing deaths in Ukraine.
Nobody has published a verified death count tied to the slowdown. The Ukrainian journalist Yurii Butusov said the cost was paid in Ukrainian blood. The lost drones and the three day grounding are documented. The rest is still being argued.
Ukraine is now trying to build its way out. Fire Point is the Ukrainian company that builds the long range drones Ukraine sends after those refineries. Its chief executive, Iryna Terekh, told Reuters on October thirtieth that her company has found ways to strike without Starlink. She also said those workarounds cover maybe fifteen to twenty percent of what full Starlink access over Russia would allow. Fire Point's co-owner, Denys Shtilerman, called dependence on Starlink a very serious weakness, and said next year they will deal with it.
October ends with four different stories. In ten days, Musk said the President decides, then said SpaceX decides. The White House said it was not them. Reuters says it was. The Journal says it was Musk. The only people who know for sure are not talking, and the soldiers who lost their drones never got a warning from any of them.
None of this started in October. It started the second day of the war.
On February twenty sixth, twenty twenty two, Ukraine's digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, posted a message to Musk. While you try to colonize Mars, Russia tries to occupy Ukraine. Please send Starlink stations. The same day, Musk answered. Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals on the way. Two days later the first shipment landed, and Fedorov posted a picture with the words, Starlink, here.
It was one of the fastest moves any company made for Ukraine in that war. Russia had knocked out Ukraine's satellite internet the morning of the invasion. Starlink filled the hole in days.
It was never as free as it first looked. The Washington Post obtained records showing the American government's foreign aid agency, USAID, bought about fifteen hundred terminals at fifteen hundred dollars each, plus eight hundred thousand dollars for shipping. A month earlier, SpaceX's president, Gwynne Shotwell, had said she did not think the American government had given SpaceX any money for Ukraine's terminals. By that fall, about twenty thousand terminals were in Ukraine, and Poland had paid for almost nine thousand of them. By SpaceX's own count to the Pentagon, about eighty five percent of the terminals in Ukraine had been paid for in full or in part by somebody else. SpaceX said it was carrying about seventy percent of the cost of the service.
In September twenty twenty two, SpaceX sent the Pentagon a letter. We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine. It put the cost at more than one hundred and twenty million dollars for the rest of that year and close to four hundred million for the next twelve months. When the letter leaked, Ukraine's ambassador to Germany told Musk to go away in language I won't repeat. Musk said SpaceX was just following his recommendation. One day later Musk reversed. The hell with it, he wrote, we'll just keep funding Ukraine's government for free.
By June twenty twenty three, the Pentagon confirmed it had a contract with SpaceX to pay for Starlink service in Ukraine. It would not say how much.
Shotwell said in February twenty twenty three that Starlink was never meant to be used as a weapon. That September, the Space Force signed SpaceX's first Starshield contract, worth up to seventy million dollars. The military version exists to do the work Shotwell said the commercial version should not do.
Poland's digital ministry says Poland has bought more than twenty four thousand terminals for Ukraine since the start of the war, and paid about eighty four million dollars over two years for terminals and monthly fees.
The first big fight over the off switch came in September twenty twenty two.
Ukraine planned to hit the Russian fleet at Sevastopol, in Crimea, with sea drones guided by Starlink. The drones lost their connection near the coast and washed up harmlessly. Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, first wrote that Musk turned coverage off that night to stop the attack. Isaacson later corrected himself. He said coverage over Crimea had never been switched on, and Musk refused a request to turn it on.
Musk's own account, posted in September twenty twenty three, goes like this. There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent was to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If he had agreed, he wrote, SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.
That was his reason. Crimea is Ukrainian territory under international law, and the ships in that harbor were firing missiles into Ukrainian cities. But one private citizen decided the strike would not happen on his network.
Then Reuters found more. In July twenty twenty five, Reuters reported that during Ukraine's fall twenty twenty two counteroffensive, Musk ordered a senior SpaceX engineer to cut coverage in parts of the Kherson region, near the town of Beryslav, and in parts of Donetsk. The engineer was Michael Nicolls, and according to Reuters he told colleagues, we have to do this. According to three sources, at least one hundred terminals went dark. Drones lost contact. Artillery targeting was disrupted. The reported reason was fear that a Russian collapse could push Moscow toward nuclear weapons. One source told Reuters Musk had taken the outcome of a war into his own hands. SpaceX called the report inaccurate. Sikorski posted a question to Musk the next day. Great man, is this true? He never got a straight answer.
The switch cut the other way too. By February twenty twenty four, Ukraine's military intelligence said Russian units near Bakhmut were using Starlink terminals smuggled in through other countries. Musk called claims that SpaceX sold terminals to Russia categorically false. Starlink said it does no business of any kind with the Russian government or military. In May twenty twenty four, a Pentagon space official said the Defense Department was working with Ukraine and SpaceX to stop Russia's illegal use of the terminals.
It took until February of this year. SpaceX and Ukraine set up a white list of approved terminals. Anything not on the list stopped working. Ukraine's defense ministry announced that Russian terminals had already been blocked. A Ukrainian general staff source said every Russian Starlink along the front was cut off. Beskrestnov said Russian command and control collapsed. A pro Kremlin blogger admitted the Russians had no alternative. Musk posted a reminder that anyone in Ukraine needed to register a terminal to keep it working. Some Ukrainian units lost service in the shuffle, until they registered.
The political fights never stopped. In February twenty twenty five, Reuters reported that American negotiators raised cutting Ukraine's Starlink access if Kyiv refused the minerals deal. Musk called that false and called Reuters liars.
In March twenty twenty five, Musk posted that his Starlink system was the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Poland's foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, answered that Poland pays about fifty million dollars a year and would look for another supplier if SpaceX proved unreliable. Musk told him, be quiet, small man, you pay a tiny fraction of the cost. Secretary Rubio backed Musk and told Sikorski to say thank you. Musk added that Starlink will never turn off Ukraine's terminals. Later he called Sikorski a drooling imbecile.
In August of this year, Sikorski threatened to stop paying for Ukraine's Starlink altogether unless Starlink put Poland back in its European service region.
The pattern shows up outside Ukraine as well. In twenty twenty two, Musk turned Starlink on for protesters in Iran after Washington eased sanctions. A United Nations telecom body ruled the next year that the service was running in Iran without the Iranian government's permission. In June twenty twenty five, after Israel struck Iran, Musk posted, the beams are on. In twenty twenty three, he offered it to aid groups in Gaza, and Israel's communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, said Hamas would use it for terrorism and threatened to cut ties with Starlink. Musk backed down and promised security checks with Washington and Jerusalem first. In twenty twenty four, Justice Alexandre de Moraes of Brazil's Supreme Court froze Starlink's bank accounts in his fight with Musk's other company, X. Musk called it an absolutely illegal action by a dictator. Starlink first refused to block X, then gave in. Shotwell asked Brazil to please stop harassing Starlink. Brazil took about three point three million dollars out of the two companies' accounts.
Taiwan watched all of this and made its own call. SpaceX wanted full ownership of a Taiwan business. Taiwan required fifty one percent local ownership. Taiwanese officials pointed to Musk's business in China, including Tesla's factory in Shanghai. One deputy minister said it plainly. If I can control him, in an emergency I can turn it off. Musk later suggested Taiwan become a special administrative zone of China, and called it an integral part of China. Taiwan's foreign minister answered that Taiwan is not part of China and certainly not for sale.
In October twenty twenty four, the Wall Street Journal reported Musk had been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin since late twenty twenty two. According to the Journal, Putin once asked him not to turn Starlink on over Taiwan, as a favor to China's leader. Two Democratic senators asked the Pentagon's inspector general and the Justice Department to look at his contracts and his security clearance.
In April twenty twenty five, while Musk was running the Department of Government Efficiency, two House Democrats wrote the Pentagon that his companies held about nine and a half billion dollars in defense contracts and about thirty eight billion dollars in government support overall. They said his government job was helping his businesses. Musk left that job at the end of May.
The full record cuts both ways. Musk got Ukraine online in two days when nobody else could. He cut the Russians off this year. He also refused Crimea, reportedly pulled coverage over Kherson, insulted the countries paying the bills, and spent four years making sure everyone knew the switch was his. That is a lot of power for a man nobody elected.
That power matters because of how big Starlink has become.
The system works because the satellites fly low, about three hundred and forty miles up, and talk to a small dish on the ground. Low orbit means fast service, but each satellite only covers a small patch of the planet at a time. Covering the whole Earth takes thousands of them, and SpaceX is the only company launching them by the thousands, on its own rockets.
At the start of June, there were about fifteen thousand seven hundred working satellites in orbit around the Earth. Over ten thousand of them were Starlink. That is about two out of every three. A satellite tracking site counted roughly eleven thousand one hundred Starlink satellites in orbit as of late October.
SpaceX reported thirteen point six million Starlink subscribers at the end of September, up one point six million in three months. The service now sells in one hundred and seventy four countries and markets.
The money has grown just as fast. SpaceX's own filings show its connectivity business, which is mostly Starlink, brought in about eleven point four billion dollars in twenty twenty five, with more than four billion in operating profit. In the third quarter of this year alone it brought in five point two billion, up sixty nine percent from a year earlier.
In June, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq. It raised about seventy five billion dollars at one hundred and thirty five dollars a share, the largest stock offering on record. That put the company's value at about one point seven seven trillion dollars. In February, before the stock sale, SpaceX also bought Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, in a deal that valued the two together at one point two five trillion dollars.
Starlink also reaches ordinary phones now. T Mobile's satellite texting service runs on Starlink, launched in July twenty twenty five at ten dollars a month. T Mobile said more than one point eight million people signed up before it even launched. SpaceX agreed to pay about seventeen billion dollars for airwave licenses from EchoStar to build the next version.
The American government leans on it hard.
The Pentagon's main contract for low orbit satellite service started with a ceiling of nine hundred million dollars. In October twenty twenty four, the ceiling went to about thirteen billion, and most of the orders under it have gone to Starshield. In May, the Space Force gave SpaceX a two point two nine billion dollar deal to build the backbone of its new military communications network, also on Starshield. That network is meant to support the President's Golden Dome missile defense plan. The Space Force is asking for more than three billion dollars for it next year, against two hundred and seventy seven million this year. In July, the military also ordered Starshield service for terminals already installed on its aircraft. Reuters reported in twenty twenty four that SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office under a one point eight billion dollar contract.
Civilian agencies use it too. In February twenty twenty five, the Federal Aviation Administration put three Starlink test terminals into service, one in Atlantic City and two in Alaska, to carry weather data for flights. Critics called it a conflict of interest while Musk was working inside the government. Reports that Starlink would take over a two point four billion dollar Verizon contract with the agency were never confirmed, and SpaceX denied them.
In June, Starlink signed a two year agreement with the State Department's disaster response bureau. After Hurricane Helene in twenty twenty four, Starlink sent one hundred and forty units to North Carolina. During the Texas Hill Country floods in July twenty twenty five, it gave free emergency service. In September, it gave Kauai free service and more than two hundred kits for emergency crews ahead of Hurricane Lowell.
That reliance has already been tested once. In June twenty twenty five, a week after Musk left Washington and fell out with the President, the President posted that the easiest way to save billions was to end Musk's government contracts. Musk answered that SpaceX would start taking its Dragon capsule out of service. Dragon is the only American spacecraft that carries astronauts to the space station. A day later, Musk took it back.
The rest of the world has been watching, and it is spending money to get away from him.
Europe is building its own network, called IRIS squared. The budget is now about fifteen point six billion euros for three hundred and forty eight satellites. Launches start in twenty twenty nine, with government service in twenty thirty. Poland alone is putting in about six hundred and fifty six million euros.
Germany is going further on its own. In July, the German army announced plans for up to twelve hundred military satellites by twenty thirty, paid for out of a thirty five billion euro space defense fund.
Europe already has one working network, Eutelsat OneWeb, with about six hundred and fifty satellites. France led a one and a half billion euro rescue of the company last December, with Britain and India's Bharti joining, and France is now its largest shareholder. In January, OneWeb ordered three hundred and forty new satellites from Airbus. Germany paid for OneWeb terminals in Ukraine, but as of last year there were fewer than a thousand of them, against about fifty thousand Starlinks.
Amazon renamed its network Amazon Leo last November. It has launched three hundred and ninety six satellites, missed its target to start service in mid twenty twenty six, and has no customers announced yet.
China is building two networks at once. Guowang had two hundred and thirty four satellites up as of September, with more than thirteen thousand planned. Qianfan, also called Spacesail, has two hundred in orbit and plans more than fifteen thousand. Brazil, the country that froze Starlink's bank accounts, approved up to three hundred and twenty four Qianfan satellites in February, with service expected before the end of this year. Kazakhstan and Malaysia have signed on too.
Italy spent much of twenty twenty five debating a one and a half billion euro deal for Starlink to carry secure government communications. No contract was signed, and the Italian defense company Leonardo announced its own eighteen satellite military network instead.
Ukraine itself is in the race. Fire Point has launched two satellites of its own and says it plans more than two hundred, about five hundred miles up, with dozens going up next year. A drone maker in a country under daily missile attack is now building its own space program.
Taiwan has gone back and forth. It says it needs about one hundred and fifty low orbit satellites and has none. Its first satellites are not due to launch until twenty twenty seven. Its space agency chief said last year the clock is ticking. It signed with Eutelsat and talked with Amazon. Then in July, Taiwan changed its telecom law to drop foreign ownership limits for satellite companies, which opened the door to Starlink. Taiwan's digital minister says Starlink has not been actively pursuing it.
None of those rivals comes close today. Amazon has about four percent of Starlink's satellites in orbit and no paying customers. Europe's network will not serve its governments for years. China's two networks together have about four hundred and thirty satellites. Musk told Sikorski there is no substitute for Starlink, and right now he is right.
That will not last forever. Europe, Germany, China, Taiwan, Poland and Ukraine are all spending billions on the same goal, which is never being at the mercy of one man's mood again. Every time Musk posts that a front line would collapse without him, he gives another government the reason to write that check.
We covered three things tonight. In October, Ukrainian drones fell out of the sky after a speed cap nobody will own, while Musk, the White House and the Pentagon gave three different stories in ten days. Since the second day of the war, Musk has decided where his satellites work, from Crimea to Kherson to the Russian trenches he finally shut off this year. And Starlink is now so big that two of every three working satellites carry its name, while half the world spends billions to escape it.
Musk built something no government could, and twice it came through for Ukraine when it counted. Credit belongs to him for that.
But a business owner who decides which strikes happen, which cities get service, and which allies deserve an insult is no longer just selling internet. He is making decisions that belong to governments, and nobody voted for him.
And it does not stop at Ukraine. Iran, Gaza, Brazil and Taiwan have already learned that service goes where he says it goes. About two and a half million American households use Starlink, many of them in rural areas with no other fast option. They all sign the same terms of service Musk used to justify cutting Ukraine's drones. A man who can switch off a country's army can switch off a farmhouse in Tennessee, and the only thing standing in the way is whether he likes what the customer is doing with it. He would not even have to cut the service. In October he never shut Ukraine off. He slowed it down until it was useless, and then said nothing was turned off. X already works the same way. Its own policy is freedom of speech, not freedom of reach, which means an account stays up while fewer and fewer people ever see it. If Musk decided he did not like New York's politics, he could turn down every Starlink dish in the state and still say nobody lost service.
That is why Europe is building its own network and Taiwan wanted the off switch for itself. Every customer who learns that lesson is a customer Starlink loses later. Elon Musk is the best salesman his competitors ever had.
That's Everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com.
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